While 11 players were busy in London securing their spots for the upcoming U.S. Open at the Olympic Club, one notable player announced he won’t be teeing it up in San Francisco.
A groin strain will prevent Darren Clarke, the defending British Open champion, from playing in the June 14-17 U.S. Open.
“I am extremely disappointed as [British] Open champion that I am unable to play the U.S. Open,” Clarke said. “I have to make sure I am 100 percent ready for the [British] Open and to do that I have been advised not to play for a month.”
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Domingo Jojola is one step away from fulfilling his childhood dream.
The USF grad has survived the local qualifying round for this year’s U.S. Open and will play in the sectional qualifying June 4 at TPC Harding Park and Lake Merced Golf Club courses.
Sporting gear from TaylorMade, which has been sponsoring him for the past year, Jojola said he has been playing both the courses for half his life, so he’s already got a leg up on some of his competition.
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Since the United States Golf Association began its preparation for June’s U.S. Open at the Olympic Club, it has touted the first six holes of the Lake Course as the most difficult in Open history.
On Thursday, NBC golf analyst and winner of the 1973 U.S. Open Johnny Miller took it even a step further.
“With No. 1 being a par 4, it’s probably the hardest opening six holes maybe in the history of major-championship golf with no wind,” Miller said on a conference call. “It’s just that they are brutal holes, they are banked the wrong way.”
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Two-time U.S. Open champion Ernie Els is among 24 players who have earned full exemptions for next month’s U.S. Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco via the world rankings, the United States Golf Association said Wednesday.
The South African Els, who won the year’s second major in 1994 and 1997, gained a spot by virtue of being ranked in the top 60 through Monday.
Els, a former world No. 1, is currently ranked 44th.
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The U.S. Open places a premium on emotion and psychology. “A lot of players,” said four-time Open champion Jack Nicklaus, “are eliminated the moment the tournament starts.” Nicklaus, certainly, wasn’t in that category. Neither were Lee Janzen or the late Payne Stewart.
The Open comes to San Francisco’s Olympic Club next month for a fifth time, and for a while now, we’ve been told how in those other four the wrong man won and Olympic, out there across the Great Highway from the Pacific, is the graveyard of champions.
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DALY CITY — After the sun sets on the final round of the U.S. Open in June, local golf fans will only need to wait a month to attend another highly competitive, world-class golf tournament.
The 64th U.S. Girls’ Junior Championships will tee off at the Lake Merced Golf Club on July 16, bringing the world’s best female golfers younger than age 18 to the Bay Area for another stirring week on the links.
“It’s a great springboard,” two-time U.S. Women’s Open champion Juli Inkster said at media day Tuesday.
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Six weeks now. Six weeks until America’s golfing championship returns to that place known as the Graveyard of Legends, San Francisco’s Olympic Club, where the chill settles, the fog swirls and expectations end up buried like a ball in the thick rough.
Olympic, alongside the Great Highway, a couple hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean, where the first hole runs atop the San Andreas fault and the last hole has a green fronted by bunkers that look very much like the letters I-O-U.
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Life has certainly changed in the past 12 months for Rory McIlroy.
A year ago, the laid-back, 22-year-old golfer from Northern Ireland was under heavy scrutiny after a meltdown in the final round of the Masters left questions of how he could handle the pressure of contending for a major championship.
McIlroy answered in emphatic, record-setting fashion by demolishing the field at Congressional Country Club to win the U.S. Open just two months later, his first career major.
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And now we wait and hope, hope the next major golf championship of 2012, the U.S. Open at San Francisco’s Olympic Club in June, can be as full of tension and greatness — and, of course, drama — as the Masters.What an ending Sunday, in the shadows after the setting sun dipped below the Georgia pines, a day of history, only the fourth double-eagle in 77 Masters and, because the winner couldn’t be determined until a sudden-death playoff, mystery.
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One step forward, two steps back. For Tiger Woods, the long road back to the top looks further away than ever.Just two weeks after he won his first PGA Tour event in more than two a half years, Woods slumped to his worst-ever finish at the Masters.The American finished his favorite tournament at five-over-par after struggling all week. He failed to break 72 in any of his four rounds and closed with a 74, completing his worst performance at Augusta National since he turned professional."I didn't hit the ball very good this week," he told reporters.
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